based on: The White Crane Institute's 'Gay Wisdom', Gay Birthdays, Gay For Today, Famous GLBT, glbt-Gay Encylopedia, Today in Gay History, Wikipedia, and more âŠ
1843 â A pioneering California writer, Charles Warren Stoddard (d.1909), is best known for his homoerotic tales collected as South-Sea Idyls and The Island of Tranquil Delights.
Stoddard was born in Rochester, New York, on August 7, 1843, second son to Sarah Freeman and Samuel Burr Stoddard, a paper merchant. As their fortunes declined during the next decade, the family moved about upstate New York and then left for San Francisco in 1854. Although Stoddard subsequently returned East for two years to live with his grandparents, he regarded himself as a Californian, and his first poems were published, under the pseudonym "Pip Pepperpod," in the Golden Era.
During the 1860s, after he had quit school and dedicated himself to a literary career, Stoddard joined San Francisco's journalistic and Bohemian circles, and he established enduring relationships with Ambrose Bierce, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, and Samuel Clemens. Beloved for his wit and amiability, Stoddard had a genius for friendship; his large literary acquaintance ultimately included both contemporary and younger writers, such as Robert Louis Stevenson, W. D. Howells, Henry Adams, Joaquin Miller, Jack London, George Sterling, Bliss Carman, Yone Noguchi, and George Cabot Lodge.
Stoddard was also connected to the developing gay networks of the nineteenth century through his friendships with Theodore F. Dwight and Dewitt Miller.
In 1864 he visited the South Sea Islands and from there wrote his Idyls â letters which he sent to a friend who had them published in book form as South Sea Idylls. He made four other trips to the South Sea Islands, and gave his impressions in Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes and The Island of Tranquil Delights. Inspired to sexual self-awareness by reading Whitman's "Calamus" poems, Stoddard gained his first experience with the natives of Hawaii and Tahiti, about whom he wrote his best stories, those collected in South-Sea Idyls (1874, 1892) and The Island of Tranquil Delights (1904). The subtle eroticism of Stoddard's tropical tales was evidently lost on his audience â except for "Xavier Mayne" (Edward Prime-Stevenson), who noted their significance in The Intersexes (1908).
Readers were also mystified by Stoddard's only novel, For the Pleasure of His Company (1903), an (unsuccessfully) experimental work of gay fiction.
Raised a Protestant, Stoddard converted to Roman Catholicism soon after the appearance of his Poems in 1867. Stoddard remained devout in his faith â among his most popular books was a spiritual autobiography, A Troubled Heart (1885) â and he cherished the companionship of priests, including Father Damien, missionary to the lepers of Molokai.
As a respected man of letters, Stoddard was recruited to academic positions at prominent Catholic institutions: Notre Dame, where he clashed with colleagues over his attentions to the male students and resigned after three semesters; and the Catholic University of America, where he taught from 1889 to 1901.
Stoddard fell in love with the painter Frank Millet during the 1870s and lived with him in Venice. But he usually favored youthful companions. Of his several "kids," as he called them, the most important was Kenneth O'Connor, aged fifteen in 1895, when Stoddard unofficially adopted him and took him home to his Washington "Bungalow."
In 1903, his health failing and his relationship with Kenneth deteriorating, Stoddard returned to California. After a triumphal visit to San Francisco, where he was feted as a pioneering California writer, he settled in Monterey, where he died of a heart attack on April 23, 1909. Stoddard's modest literary reputation had already faded before his collected Poems appeared posthumously in 1917. The gayest of the island stories have been collected in Cruising the South Seas (1987).
1911 â Nicholas Ray (born Raymond Nicholas Kienzle) (d.1979) was an American film director. Coming from a radio background, Ray directed his first and only Broadway production, the Duke Ellington musical Beggar's Holiday, in 1946. One year later, he directed his first film, They Live By Night. It was released two years later due to the chaotic conditions surrounding Howard Hughes' takeover of RKO Pictures. An almost impressionistic, tender take on film noir, it was notable for its extreme empathy for society's young outsiders (a recurring motif in Ray's films). It was influential in the sporadically popular sub-genre often called 'love on the run' movies, concerning as it does two young fugitive lovers on the run from the law. (Other examples are Gun Crazy, Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and Robert Altman's 70's remake of They Live By Night: Thieves Like Us.)
Ray made several more contributions to the film noir genre, most notably the Humphrey Bogart movie In A Lonely Place about a troubled screenwriter, and On Dangerous Ground, a powerful police thriller. The former is noted for featuring one of Bogart's most complex performances.
Ray's most productive and successful period was the 1950s, although his sympathy for society's outsiders and rebels clearly pre-dated the 1960s counter-culture. It was in the mid-50s that he made the two films for which he is best remembered. Johnny Guitar (1954) was an influential, proto-feminist western much loved by French critics (Fraǹois Truffaut called it 'the beauty and the beast' of the western).
In 1955, however, Ray directed the iconic Rebel Without a Cause. Its legendary status had much to do with its star James Dean, whose premature death followed soon after the film's completion. Looking past its main attraction these days as a vehicle for the poster boy of a generation, Rebel Without a Cause distilled much of the essence of Ray's cinematic vision: expressionistic use of colour, dramatic use of architecture and an empathy for those who struggle to fit in to mainstream society.
Ray also made many other films in multiple genres which, although made with professionalism and flair, were comparatively minor works, often suffering from unwanted studio interference.
A bisexual and heavy user of drugs and alcohol, Ray found himself increasingly shut out of the Hollywood film industry in the early 1960s. After collapsing on the set of 55 Days at Peking (1963), he would not direct again until the mid-1970s.
Ray deserves to be acknowledged as an important figure in queer cultural history, partly because of his own bisexuality but primarily because of the queer perspectives in his films. Although the case for Ray's bisexuality is overwhelming, some friends and family members have attempted to deny it. Ray's mentor, director Elia Kazan; his fourth wife, Susan Ray; and other close friends and family members are among those who have insisted upon Ray's heterosexuality. However, another close personal friend and professional collaborator, John Houseman, noted Ray's sexual interest in other men. In his memoirs, Housman described Ray as "a potential homosexual with a deep, passionate and constant need for female love."
In his recent book on gay men and lesbians in Hollywood, William J. Mann also characterized Ray as a deeply closeted homosexual. Because homosexuality was strictly illegal in the United States during the early and mid-twentieth century, it is difficult to find definitive proof of homosexual behavior by prominent Americans of the era. Nevertheless, throughout Ray's adult life, there were widespread rumors concerning his bisexuality. For example, many of his associates, including actor Farley Granger and writer Gore Vidal, who resided at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood while Ray lived there during the mid-1950s, claimed that he simultaneously conducted affairs with Sal Mineo, James Dean, and Natalie Wood during the filming of Rebel without a Cause.
The fullest published documentation of Ray's bisexuality is provided by Gavin Lambert in Mainly about Lindsay Anderson (2000). Lambert met Ray in February 1956, while he was in England, publicizing Rebel without a Cause. In the midst of seducing Lambert the night that they met, Ray declared to him that he was not really homosexual or even bisexual because he had slept with more women than men. Nevertheless, Lambert was literally swept off his feet by Ray's passion and accepted his invitation to follow him back to the United States. Ray secured employment for Lambert at Twentieth Century-Fox as a screenwriter and production assistant, and he also used his influence to expedite the processing of a visa and work permit. Arriving in Hollywood in March 1956, Lambert lived with Ray at the Chateau Marmont until November. Lambert characterized Ray as an erratic but very possessive lover. In November, Lambert ended their affair because he had wearied of Ray's alcoholism and his tendency to ignore him for extended periods while entertaining a seemingly endless stream of starlets.
From 1971 to 1973, Ray taught film making at Harpur College (part of the State University of New York) where he and his students produced We Can't Go Home Again, an ambitious autobiographical film employing split-screen images. An early version of the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray, never satisfied with the project, continued editing it until his death in 1979. He died of lung cancer on June 16, 1979 at the age of 67 in New York City, New York.
Undoubtedly, the most famous line from any film by Ray is Johnny Guitar's declaration: "I am a stranger here myself." That line describes Ray's own attitude to the world, as well as the situation of the protagonists in his films. In movies such as Johnny Guitar and Rebel without a Cause, he depicted outsiders who challenged dominant social and gender conventions and who continue to inspire queer viewers in the early twenty-first century.
1944 â John Glover is an American actor best known for his usually villanous roles in films and television. He can still be seen as Lionel Luthor in re-runs of the TV series Smallville. He has also appeared in Scrooged, Batman and Robin, Gremlins 2 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and notably, briefly in Annie Hall.
He appeared in the TV movie An Early Frost in 1985, the first TV film to touch on the AIDS issue and received an Emmy nomination for his performance as a gay AIDS patient. He won a Tony for his performance in Love! Valour! Compassion! on Broadway, and reprised his dual roles as twins in the film version. The play is set at a lakeside summer vacation house in orth of New York City where eight gay friends, including the twin brothers, spend the three major holiday weekends of one summer together for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day. He also appeared in The Drowsy Chaperone on Broadway during Summer 2007.
His partner is the sculptor Adam Kurtzman.
1963 â William J. Mann is an American novelist, biographer, and Hollywood historian best known for his 2006 biography of Katharine Hepburn, Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn. Kate was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2006 by The New York Times.
Mann was born in Connecticut and, after working briefly as a Capitol Hill aide, received his Master's degree at Wesleyan University.
He worked as a journalist at Metroline magazine, New England's oldest gay publication, from 1992 to 1995. Mann published his first novel, The Men From the Boys, in 1997, and continued with a series of books set in Provincetown, although he has also set his fiction in Palm Springs and Los Angeles. In addition, Mann has written the nonfiction books Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star (1998), a biography of film star Billy Haines, for which he won the Lambda Literary Award; Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood (2001); and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger (2005).
Kate didn't quite get the widespread attention it deserved because the mainstream didn't want to hear their icon was primarily a lesbian and her endlessly hyped romance with Spencer Tracy was cover for their separate same-sex adventures.
Mann's five novels are: The Men from the Boys, The Biograph Girl, Where The Boys Are, All American Boy, and Object of Desire.
1975 â Kristian Eivind Espedal, better known by his stage name Gaahl, is a Norwegian vocalist, best known as the former frontman of Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth. He is also the founder and frontman of Trelldom and Gaahlskagg. As of 2008, he has been involved in other projects such as Wardruna.
In July 2008, Gaahl revealed in an online interview that he was involved in the creation of Wynjo, an upcoming fashion collection for women, together with Norwegian modeling agent Dan De Vero and designer Sonja Wu. At the same time, it was also revealed that he and De Vero had a "close relationship" since 2006. It was stated that they were no longer a couple but remained as good friends. In an interview for the November 2008 issue of Rock Hard, Gaahl confirmed his homosexuality.
Shortly thereafter, De Vero stated that he had received threats from various black metal fans, both at his door and by phone and email. It was also alleged that a fight had erupted backstage at Wacken Open Air, triggered by homophobic remarks. Allegedly, the person who made the remarks had to be hospitalised. However, Gaahl denied that anyone had ever "said anything derogatory" to him in person.
When asked by the webzine FaceCulture if he thinks people will see him and his music differently now that he has publicly acknowledged his homosexuality, Gaahl replied:
Mankind is known to be narrow-minded, so... maybe some [will have a negative reaction]. But I guess it will even out the score in a way. I think it will be positive for some and negative for some. It's always good to have some negative as well. Otherwise you would end up with equality and equality is the worst thing in the world. Equality is stagnation. It doesn't let anything grow. It holds back.
On 27 January 2010, Gaahl won the award "gay person of the year" in Bergen at the event "Bergen Gay Galla". He was present and accepted the award
1981 â David Testo, born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, is an American soccer player. He has played for the Vancouver Whitecaps and the Montreal Impact. He is one of the few openly homosexual athletes in professional sports.
He signed with the Vancouver Whitecaps in 2006. Despite missing several games due to serious injuries in mid-season with the Whitecaps, Dave's quick pivots and brilliant touch passes made him a favourite among fans and teammates in this his first season in Vancouver. He was named Newcomer of the Year and was second in team scoring (7 goals, 7 assists) behind Joey Gjertsen (13 goals, 7 assists) while playing both as a striker and in his preferred midfield positions equally well.
Testo was traded to the Montreal Impact on July 26, 2007 along with Joey Gjertsen for Alen Marcina, and ZĂ© Roberto. He recorded his first goal for Montreal on August 1, 2007 against Carolina Railhawks. During the 2008 USL season Testo played in 20 matches for the Impact, and scored one goal against Miami FC on July 18, 2008. In the 2008 Canadian Championship he appeared in all four matches for the Impact, and scored a goal in 2-0 victory over the Vancouver Whitecaps.
On November 30, 2009 Testo signed a new two-year deal with the club. Testo was released by Montreal on October 12, 2011.
In an interview on with the French Canadian division of Radio Canada that was published on November 10, 2011, Testo stated that he is gay and that his family, friends, teammates, and team management knew of his homosexuality. Since coming out, former teamates have expressed support and respect for Testo.
He says, however, he regrets not going public until now:
"It's hard, like living the life of a professional athlete and being gay is incredibly hard," the athlete told the media. "It's like carrying around a secret, you know, and carrying around luggage and just never being allowed to be yourself."
Testo is a member of the Advisory Board for You Can Play, a campaign dedicated to fighting homophobia in sports.